Sarah Connolly

08 October 2013

The five-star recommendation praises the orchestra's "devastating emotional sweep and delicious sensitivity", the tenor's "power, commitment and beauty of tone", and "a conductor who knows how to relay everything through his hands".

Amazon have recently garnered a lot of publicity for removing fake reviews - that is, gushing praise by friends and family pretending to be ordinary customers. One of their terms is that a reviewer may not "impersonate any person or entity". But Connolly is not pretending to be someone else. She makes it perfectly clear who she is, and I can find nothing in Amazon's terms to suggest an artist cannot comment on their own work.

For most classical CDs these days, the most that that can be hoped for in the way of independent review is a couple of lines in one of the Sunday papers. So is there anything wrong in artists taking matters into their own hands?

Wigmore Hall's 110th anniversary season is made of awesome, with recitals coming up from just about everyone you could possibly want to hear, including rare visitors like Jonas Kaufmann, Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim.

But the season's opening weekend was almost derailed by illness, with both Karita Mattila and Angelika Kirchschlager suffering from colds. Kirchschlager's was so bad she cancelled her scheduled appearance on the Saturday, eventually appearing - only partially recovered - on Monday.